Restitution and the Politics of Repair

'This lucid, beautifully written and carefully argued new book offers something new to the field of political theory: a deepening of the language of restitution in the realm of the political. The problem of recovering what was lost - the ordinary language definition of restitution - is here given new language, new imaginings and a fascinating new set of texts. This is a must read for critical political theorists, those interested in cultural, memory and trauma studies.' Catherine Kellogg, University of Alberta
Analyses the social imaginary of undoing, repair and return underpinning the international norm of restitution-making
This book takes a unique approach grounded in political and cultural discourse to develop a political theory of restitution. Challenging assumptions about restitution in the Western legal and political tradition, where it has become nearly synonymous with reacquisition and where legal studies focus on material objects and claims to their ownership, Zolkos argues that the development of restitutive norms has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty, and excavates the restitutive tradition's mythical-religious substrate.
Bringing together texts from within and outwith the Western canon of political theory and philosophy, including the writings of Grotius, Durkheim, Freud, and Klein, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book undertakes a dual task: reading literary texts as a political theorising of restitution, and reading political or sociological texts as literary narratives with distinctive 'restitutive tropes' of repair, undoing and return.
Magdalena Zolkos is Humboldt Research Fellow at the Memory Studies Platform at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Cover image: War and Separation, Carol Heft, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 47 inches, 2020 Cover design:
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Magdalena Zolkos is Humboldt Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, Goethe University. She has been published in journals including Angelaki, Contemporary Political Theory, SubStance and Textual Practice. Her first book, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Amery and Imre Kertesz, was published by Continuum in 2010. She is co-editor of Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched (Lexington Press, 2019).

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Imagining Restitution; Chapter 1 In dominum pristinum statuere: Hugo Grotius's Theory of Restitution and the Return of the Former Condition of Things; Chapter 2 The Creature as a Figure of Unrestitutability, or Monsters in Paradise not Allowed: Benevolence and Restitution in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Chapter 3 Émile Durkheim's Restitutive Humanitarianism: from Organic Solidarity to the 'Solidarity of Things'; Chapter 4 'I only loved': Restitution in Psychoanalysis; Epilogue Restitution that Doubles the Loss; Bibliography; Endnotes.